Just about everything that’s wrong with the city’s obsession with bike lanes is encapsulated in the new lanes currently under construction that will soon be clogging and congesting traffic downtown.

There’s the bad math and the unrealistic goals; the determination that removing an entire lane of vehicle traffic on busy downtown streets will rapidly (and simply) convince thousands of motorists a day to become thousands of cycle commuters.

This is part of council’s and the administration’s willfully blind belief in “green” commuting. A large chunk of transit riders (who make up about 11 per cent of Edmonton’s population) say they would drive to work if they could. And the fact that over 80 per cent of us still do drive is proof that’s what we want to do.

Yet administration always proposes (and councillors always swallow) an if-we-build-it-they-will-come mentality. Their thinking is that it’s not the distance commuters have to go to get to work that keeps us from cycling, it’s not the weather five or six months a year, it’s the lack of fancy bike lanes that cost $1 million per kilometre.

The rabid push for more bike lanes, even in the face of a low upper limit of potential demand, is also an example of the politicization of transportation. Municipal politicians and bureaucrats believe it is their duty to lead us to a more enlightened state. In their minds, some modes should be given higher priority because they are morally and socially superior. There’s a missionary zeal to planning, a conviction that cycling will make us all better people and citizens (a belief that itself is based on the assumption most of us aren’t good enough citizens or people already).

Contractors are currently installing about seven kilometres of bike lanes downtown set apart from traffic by concrete barriers and pylons. There’s also a confusing new array of traffic signs instructing motorists to veer here and zag there to avoid the lanes.

When council approved this network last fall, bureaucrats and politicians (and even engineering giant Stantec) insisted the lanes could be installed without motorists noticing much of a change.

But as the network has taken shape this spring, that reassurance has turned out to be at best an exaggeration.

The lanes will clearly squeeze four lanes of traffic down to three (and in some places two), inconveniencing thousands of motorists a day for the sake of a few hundred cyclists (at most).

Calgary began a similar project five years ago and expanded it two years ago. Now that city’s leaders claim their lanes are a great success. More than twice as many bicycle commuters – maybe 1,500 a day – use them now compared with the beginning.

Whoopee! The success is never measured against the thousands of other Calgarians the lanes displaced.

Cycles will now have the right-of-way, too, in downtown Edmonton where vehicle traffic and bike traffic converge, creating even more congestion and delays.

The you’re-stupid-we’re-smart attitude can be seen in the fact that planners, politicians and cycling activists all acknowledge that motorists won’t like the changes – at first – but with proper education they trust we will all come to support it.

The smug moralism behind the project can also be seen in statements such as “providing good bike infrastructure is a question of public health,” from Chris Chan, executive director of Edmonton Bicycle Commuters.

The cycling activist group plans to use the network as part of a “Birds and Bees” outing July 15 to tour urban bee farms and chicken coops – another fashionable hipster idea council is fascinated with.

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